President Donald Trump’s cuts to the US overseas aid budget are fuelling concern in African communities about how they will deal with the worsening impacts of climate change, as Climate Home found when visiting a now-halted project in Malawi that protected forests and provided poorer, rural people with ways of making money that enabled them to cope better with drought.
Malawians in the areas that benefited from the USAID-backed programme criticised the decision. The chair of Mbatamile village’s natural resources management committee, Lucia Kasimu, said: “It is our plea that the US government rescind its decision – to help the poor. It is their money we know, but this will leave many people suffering from climate change.”
Since 2019, the Modern Cooking for Healthy Forests Accelerator (MCHF) programme – co-funded by the UK – has been teaching people in Salima district to make stoves that use less firewood, cultivate mangoes, produce honey from bee-keeping and grow trees, whose wood they can use or sell.
But a spokesperson for American consulting firm Tetra Tech, which led the MCHF project, told Climate Home last month it was “under a stop-work order from USAID until further notice”, after Trump implemented a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance, including climate projects, on his first day in office.
Drought resilience
Last year, drought killed thousands of cattle across Southern Africa, including in Malawi, as there was not enough grass and water to sustain them. The vice-chair of Mbatmile’s resources committee, Enock Joseph, said the skills taught by theforest programme allowed villagers to earn additional income and buy food when drought or other climate–driven disasters strike.
“Animals are dying due to drought and people are suffering as a result of climate change. Salima is prone to drought – and when there is hunger, people rely on these economic activities to survive,” he said.
With more efficient cookstoves, the project also aimed to reduce demand for firewood in a bid to protect Malawi’s forests. Almost all Malawian households depend on wood or charcoal for cooking and heating. The MCHF also supported the government’s national forest inventory, which tracks levels of forest cover.
An efficient cookstove (left). Charcoal for sale along the road in Malawi (below).
Joseph said nobody else would be trained to produce cookstoves, honey or mangoes and patrols to stop logging in Thuma forest would end, warning that tree-cutting for charcoal was likely to increase.
He told Climate Home it was wrong for the US to cut aid so abruptly, leaving recipients and employees out of pocket in a food crisis. “For the project to end just like this is like removing an oxygen supply machine from a patient in an ICU so that he dies quickly,” Joseph added.
Tetra Tech declined to comment further. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office did not comment on its specific support for the MCHF project but told Climate Home it is working “to assess the implications of the US funding pause across development programmes”.
While Trump had criticised USAID in general before winning the presidential election, there was no indication he would immediately freeze its spending or launch drastic cuts so rapidly.
Since he took power, his administration has said in court filings it will try to slash over 90% of the foreign aid agency’s budget – although it remains unclear if that effort will be successful, given that USAID’s budget is controlled largely by Congress.
After Trump’s move, the UK followed suit by announcing plans to slash its aid budget from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3%. Germany, France, the Netherlands and several other European nations have also proposed aid cuts in recent months.
Trump’s cuts to USAID projects are hurting communities in the Global South, particularly in Africa. Bloomberg reported that US has scrapped support for the Power Africa programme, which provided grants for renewable energy on the continent, and the World Food Programme this week said it would have to close its Southern Africa office in Johannesburg in expectation of US and European funding cuts.
The US has also ended its participation in – and financing for – the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, which aimed to shift South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam from coal to clean energy. German Development State Secretary Jochen Flasbarth said the US move was “regrettable” but with European nations, Canada and Japan still involved he was “convinced” the partnerships would be successful.
But Mattias Söderberg, global climate lead at DanChurchAid, told Climate Home that USAID cuts will have not only humanitarian impacts on people but also “huge security and geopolitical consequences”.
“I understand if there is a political will to change the policies in USA,” he said. “However, I can’t understand the way the cut was done. Funding commitments were cancelled and contracts broken. This way of closing down is disrupting the work of local organisations, and development actors.”
The case shows that climate change is a fundamental human rights violation—and the victory of Bonaire, a Dutch territory, could open the door for similar lawsuits globally.
Interview by Paloma Beltran, Living on Earth
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Greenpeace Netherlands campaigner Eefje de Kroon.
SYDNEY, Saturday 28 February 2026 — Greenpeace International and Greenpeace organisations in the US announce they will seek a new trial and, if necessary, appeal the decision with the North Dakota Supreme Court following a North Dakota District Court judgment today awarding Energy Transfer (ET) USD $345 million.
ET’s SLAPP suit remains a blatant attempt to silence free speech, erase Indigenous leadership of the Standing Rock movement, and punish solidarity with peaceful resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace International will also continue to seek damages for ET’s bullying lawsuits under EU anti-SLAPP legislation in the Netherlands.
Mads Christensen, Greenpeace International Executive Director said: “Energy Transfer’s attempts to silence us are failing. Greenpeace International will continue to resist intimidation tactics. We will not be silenced. We will only get louder, joining our voices to those of our allies all around the world against the corporate polluters and billionaire oligarchs who prioritise profits over people and the planet.
“With hard-won freedoms under threat and the climate crisis accelerating, the stakes of this legal fight couldn’t be higher. Through appeals in the US and Greenpeace International’s groundbreaking anti-SLAPP case in the Netherlands, we are exploring every option to hold Energy Transfer accountable for multiple abusive lawsuits and show all power-hungry bullies that their attacks will only result in a stronger people-powered movement.”
The Court’s final judgment today rejects some of the jury verdict delivered in March 2025, but still awards hundreds of millions of dollars to ET without a sound basis in law. The Greenpeace defendants will continue to press their arguments that the US Constitution does not allow liability here, that ET did not present evidence to support its claims, that the Court admitted inflammatory and irrelevant evidence at trial and excluded other evidence supporting the defense, and that the jury pool in Mandan could not be impartial.[1][2]
ET’s back-to-back lawsuits against Greenpeace International and the US organisations Greenpeace USA (Greenpeace Inc.) and Greenpeace Fund are clear-cut examples of SLAPPs — lawsuits attempting to bury nonprofits and activists in legal fees, push them towards bankruptcy and ultimately silence dissent.[3] Greenpeace International, which is based in the Netherlands, is pursuing justice in Europe, with a suit against ET under Dutch law and the European Union’s new anti-SLAPP directive, a landmark test of the new legislation which could help set a powerful precedent against corporate bullying.[4]
Kate Smolski, Program Director at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “This is part of a worrying trend globally: fossil fuel corporations are increasingly using litigation to attack and silence ordinary people and groups using the law to challenge their polluting operations — and we’re not immune to these tactics here in Australia.
“Rulings like this have a chilling effect on democracy and public interest litigation — we must unite against these silencing tactics as bad for Australians and bad for our democracy. Our movement is stronger than any corporate bully, and grows even stronger when under attack.”
Energy Transfer’s SLAPPs are part of a wave of abusive lawsuits filed by Big Oil companies like Shell, Total, and ENI against Greenpeace entities in recent years.[3] A couple of these cases have been successfully stopped in their tracks. This includes Greenpeace France successfully defeating TotalEnergies’ SLAPP on 28 March 2024, and Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace International forcing Shell to back down from its SLAPP on 10 December 2024.
[1] The judgment entered by North Dakota District Court Judge Gion follows a jury verdict finding Greenpeace entities liable for more than US$660 million on March 19, 2025. Judge Gion subsequently threw out several items from the jury’s verdict, reducing the total damages to approximately US$345 million.
[2] Public statements from the independent Trial Monitoring Committee
[3] Energy Transfer’s first lawsuit was filed in federal court in 2017 under the RICO Act – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a US federal statute designed to prosecute mob activity. The case was dismissed in 2019, with the judge stating the evidence fell “far short” of what was needed to establish a RICO enterprise. The federal court did not decide on Energy Transfer’s claims based on state law, so Energy Transfer promptly filed a new case in a North Dakota state court with these and other state law claims.
[4] Greenpeace International sent a Notice of Liability to Energy Transfer on 23 July 2024, informing the pipeline giant of Greenpeace International’s intention to bring an anti-SLAPP lawsuit against the company in a Dutch Court. After Energy Transfer declined to accept liability on multiple occasions (September 2024, December 2024), Greenpeace International initiated the first test of the European Union’s anti-SLAPP Directive on 11 February 2025 by filing a lawsuit in Dutch court against Energy Transfer. The case was officially registered in the docket of the Court of Amsterdam on 2 July, 2025. Greenpeace International seeks to recover all damages and costs it has suffered as a result of Energy Transfers’s back-to-back, abusive lawsuits demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from Greenpeace International and the Greenpeace organisations in the US. The next hearing in the Court of Amsterdam is scheduled for 16 April, 2026.
The Trump administration’s relentless rollback of public health and environmental protections has allowed widespread toxic exposures to flourish, warn experts who helped implement safeguards now under assault.
By Liza Gross
In a new report that outlines a dozen high-risk pollutants given new life thanks to weakened, delayed or rescinded regulations, the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of hundreds of former Environmental Protection Agency staff, warns that the EPA under President Donald Trump has abandoned the agency’s core mission of protecting people and the environment from preventable toxic exposures.
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